9/22/2004 @ 3:00PM

And They Lived Happily Ever After

When it comes to creating happiness, being married is worth $100,000 per year. That was the conclusion of a recent paper by economists
David
Blanchflower
David Blanchflower
and
Andrew
Oswald
Andrew Oswald
.

Does this mean that a movie star who makes $20 million a year can get divorced five times (as some have been known to do) and still be just as happy as a chief executive who makes a mere $19.5 million year? No. Nor does it mean that a $20,000-per-year clerk automatically feels like a $120,000-per-year stockbroker immediately upon tying the knot.

And no, the joy derived from marriage is not due to a big engagement ring from
Tiffany
, a fabulous honeymoon in a
Four Seasons
hotel or gifts received via the wedding registry department at
Blomingdale’s
. Instead, the dollar value of a lasting marriage is derived by comparing the happiness of the average married woman to that of the average widow. The researchers found that making the widow just as happy as she was when married would take an additional $100,000 annually over her current income. Like most economic measures of happiness, the dollar value derived by Blanchflower, a Dartmouth College professor, and Oswald, who teaches at Warwick University, comes from a hypothetical comparison involving a person of average income who moves from one situation to another.

Whatever the precise dollar value, economists say that marriage is good for you. Married people are healthier, both physically and psychologically; they live longer; they benefit from a kind of all-purpose insurance policy against adverse life events. Married people earn more money, even accounting for the prospect that those who may earn more may be more likely to get married in the first place. No surprise: They are also happier, economists say, citing survey data not just in the U.S. but in the European Union, Russia and Latin America. It’s true for both men and women.

So it’s not just your mother telling you to get married, it’s your economist, too.

But some students of money and happiness are taking the question a step further, something most mothers do not do. “Does Marriage Make People Happy, or Do Happy People Get Married?” That’s the title of a recent study by
Alois
Stutzer
Alois Stutzer
and
Bruno
Frey
Bruno Frey
, economists at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich. They wondered whether the happiness of married people really is due to marriage itself, or whether it’s just that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place.

Based on 17 years of surveys in conducted in Germany, Stutzer and Frey concluded that there is indeed a large “selection effect”–people destined for marriage were more happy to begin with than those who remained single. Also, “those who get divorced were already less happy when they were newly married and when they were single.”

But the authors concluded that, even accounting for disposition, “the positive and sizable effect of being married rather than single remains.”

Whatever its cause, the effect is so pronounced that the reduction in the percentage of married people (due to divorce and later marriages) may be a primary cause of what Blanchflower and Oswald say is an overall decline in the level of well-being in the U.S. over the last quarter-century. While both married people and non-marrieds (whether never married, divorced or widowed) have grown slightly happier, the fact that a smaller share are married has made the overall level of U.S. subjective well-being lower than it was in the 1970s.

Of course, one reason for the lower marriage rates is the rise in divorce rates. Divorce, by all accounts, is bad for well-being. On the other hand, being in bad marriage is not a great situation either.

“With divorce, it depends on how you look at it,” says George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in the economics of tradeoffs. “People who get divorced actually get happier when they get divorced.” They are, however, decidedly less happy than those who get married and stay that way.